Saturday, October 27, 2012

Twitter and Facebook 'harming children's development.' From The Telegraph.

By Graeme Paton

A generation of children risks growing up with obsessive personalities, poor self-control, short attention spans and little empathy because of an addiction to social networking websites such as Twitter, a leading neuroscientist has warned.

Young people’s brains are failing to develop properly after being overexposed to the cyber world at an early age, it was claimed.

Baroness Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, said a decline in physical human contact meant children struggled to formulate basic social skills and emotional reactions.

She criticised the “unhealthy” addiction to Twitter among some users who resort to increasingly nasty outbursts under the “sanitised and often anonymous guise of the web”.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, she also raised concerns over the “narcissistic” nature of sites such as Klout, which measures users’ popularity and influence on social networks.

The comments come just 24 hours after teachers warned that over-exposure to technology was damaging children’s ability to concentrate in the classroom.
A survey of secondary English teachers revealed that more than three-quarters thought pupils’ attention spans were shorter than ever before.

Baroness Greenfield quoted figures showing that more than half of 13- to 17-year-olds now spend more than 30 hours a week using video games, computers, e-readers, mobile phones and other screen-based technology.

She said the human brain evolved to its surroundings and needed a “stimulating environment” to grow and properly develop.

No I wasn't. My mom wouldn't allow me to watch TV without her permission: she constantly told me to "Go outside and play." She wouldn't allow me to watch the Jerry Lewis show at all, because she said, "He was vulgar," and she was right.

By the way, that my dear mother did not allow me to watch much TV may have contributed to my becoming the smartest kid in the school, and to grow up to become a college professor, a job that as you know has become miserable. Life loves its ironies, and now I am being ironic.

If you want any more evidence, consider that during his inauguration, JFK invited Robert Frost to read some poems. The night after Martin Luther King was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy calmed down an audience in Indianapolis with a speech that included lines from a poem by Aeschylus. Can you imagine what would happen if a politician were to try either, today? People would change the channel to WWE.

"My fear is that having an identity which is externally constructed and dependent on the moment-by-moment reactions of others..."

That sentence pretty much describes the condition of being a middle- or high-school student. I was a little underwhelmed by the quality of the article, even though I'm a very sympathetic audience for reporting on education and technology.

For the past few years, my (high) school administration has been aggressively imposing digital technology throughout the school. The results for learning quality have been immediate and disastrous across the board.

The high school recently began a "laptop initiative" through which every student is provided with a small laptop and required to bring it to every class every day (the fee for the device is added to their tuition). The students are baffled and annoyed by the whole thing. They find the laptops to be an expensive distraction, and have already begun to unite against the admin's push to go completely to e-books. The kids do NOT want e-books; they recognize that they do not read as deeply or carefully on computer screens, and they are VERY aware of internet access (even in the form of "helpful" hyperlinks) as a distraction.

Our middle schoolers all have iPads. The results have been akin to asking a drug addict to carry around a giant bag of cocaine all day. Hey Kids! Here's the most distracting device ever created by man! Now don't use it inappropriately!

The administrators care about all of this...not at all. What matters is that their resumes say that they "implemented" an "initiative" that is flashy and trendy.

Sadly, the "system," even in very good schools, is often working against the best interests of good teaching and learning.

Agreed! My son and I resisted the netbook initiative in his middle school until a schedule change made it absolutely necessary. I bought a sturdy, padded bag for it. Within two weeks, the screen cracked in his gym locker, and we had to pay $125 to repair this thing he never wanted. The school wouldn't let him have a replacement because he'd broken the first one. He finished the class with an A anyway.

I hate it whenever people like this are right, like when Rick Santorum (admittedly in his usual inimitable way) pointed out that college isn't for everyone, but I think Greenie is right, at least this time.

The thing about TV: it doesn't require anyone to respond; you can plunk a child or an adult in front of it and leave them alone and they don't expect the TV to talk back or pay *them* attention... I'm good with that from my students. I'm less enchanted with their need for immediate feedback and constant stroking of egos.

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.